Sunday, November 13, 2011

Big Happenings - It's the annual Premiers Conference

It’s been over two months since I last wrote anything and it’s about time I put something down as life is moving along here.

The work here and I guess my purpose for being here has been given a new lease of life through the redefining of my assignment and directing most of my efforts towards the Provincial Government, this actually suits me well as most of my conservation and environmental work has been directed through roles in local governance of some sort, so it’s good to be in a similar role although how local governance works here is reasonably different to either Australia or New Zealand due to the political and cultural context it operates in.

The organisation is fantastic with many great staff,  these staff face a daily David and Goliath struggle to represent the people of Choiseul /Lauru in the face of overwhelming issues related to climate change, logging, mining, social, health, communication, information accessibility and storage, asset renewal and maintenance, centralised governance and the list goes on. From what I can tell so far ensuring good staff come out here and are happy enough to stay for a long time is going to be one of the biggest issues for the future of the Province and ensuring that they can tackle the big issues.           

The Premiers Conference that took place in late October was probably the biggest party Taro has seen in a long while. The Premiers Conference is basically a meeting of all the Premiers representing all the Provinces of the Solomon Islands and is held on annual basis with the location being a different Province every year. While listening in on the presentations given, it became very clear that the concern about the condition of the environment is shared by many of the Premiers. There were also concerns raised about financial resource allocation and the smaller Provinces expressed concern about how remoteness is a real hindrance to development that the other more centralised Provinces experience. In hindsight it’s that same remoteness that has probably contributed to Choiseul/Lauru being less environmentally degraded than it could be as most of the more accessible Provinces look to have lost most of their Primary Rainforest cover already.           

I had a brief but informative discussion (well I’m hoping it was for him) with the Premier of Makira Province and told him about the importance of Makira for the 12 or so endemic bird species that the Island is home too, if anything he was only mildly interested in learning this, as you would expect a non-birder to be but at least now he knows. 

The event itself represented a great free feed at both lunch and dinner time, which was great as it saved me cooking and being a volunteer you are forced to be fiscally conservative. Now technically it could be argued that I wasn’t actually part of the Conference as I was not officially a Provincial representative or ancillary staff, but through my partly self-proclaimed role as Provincial Government photographer and real role as a planning advisor, I considered myself eligible.

The food was unbelievable and it really went to show the quality of the food available from the natural environment; Mangrove crab, Taro, Crayfish, Fin fish of all kinds, shellfish and one or two green things thrown in for good measure. Mistakenly I even ended up eating Turtle as I mistook it for chicken, don't worry it won’t happen again as I’m not inclined to consume endangered species.     

Just before the Premiers Conference began an event to select the theme song for the Premiers Conference was held. It was a chance for the five groups to present their original songs to a public audience, the performances were all vocal performances performed to pre-recorded tracks and it would have been great to see and hear people play instruments live, even so it was just really good to see people have the opportunity to perform and show there community what they’ve got. The entertainment that was part of the Premiers Conference itself included live performances from a number of groups, the one that I was impressed with was the group that used plastic pipes as a percussion instrument that they hit with slippers (SI), Jandals (NZ), thong s(Aus).  The only down side was that these pipes were originally supplied for the purposes of water supply projects and then converted into these instruments, bugger!          

The entire Premiers Conference had such a positive upbeat feel that made most for those few days feel upbeat. It’s really the only occasion where I have seen a really good party atmosphere and people really let loose in public and just get up and dance. Maybe this is another reason why Kiwis and Solomon Islanders get along so well as we share a similar level of public reservation.        

The one blight on the landscape for this event was the shortage of flights to and from Taro and access to banking facilities. I let both companies know what I thought of their service provision for this period, but it seems that in this instance both companies took advantage of peoples reluctance to complain openly and also used the remoteness and difficulties in communication to their advantage, here we are ‘out of sight and out of mind’ to many in Honiara.